Part 1 - Search Engine Visibility
How to connect with your target audience at the best possible time, when they are actively searching for what you provide.
Search Engine Visibility - Concepts and Best Practices
This is partly a book about search engine optimization. All of the strategies outlined in this book will help you increase your website's search engine visibility for key phrases (phrases related to your products or services). So we can't go any further without talking a little about search engine optimization.
If you're an SEO guru and you want to skip ahead, feel free to move on to the next chapter about business websites. If you're an SEO novice, or only semi-familiar with the subject, then please stick with me.
Summary of Terms
In this book, I'll be talking a lot about SEO, search engine visibility, and similar terms. So let's start with some basic definitions:
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of improving a website or blog to make it more visible in search engines, like Google, for specific phrases.
Search engine visibility is the goal of SEO. If you improve your search engine visibility for relevant phrases, people will have an easier time finding you online.
Key search phrases are any phrases your audience would type into a search engine to find the kinds of products / services you provide. If you sell custom purple widgets, you would obviously want your website or blog to come in a search engine when somebody enters that phrase. So you would use search engine optimization to improve your search engine visibility for the key phrase "custom purple widgets."
Terminology lesson complete! You may now press on.
What's a Search Engine?
A search engine is an Internet-based tool that identifies (and ranks) websites based on the search terms entered. These search terms are also known as keywords and key phrases. Google is by far the most popular search engine. Yahoo, MSN, Ask and AOL follow in terms of popularity and usage.
There are also specialty search engines for certain topics and industries, such as the real estate search tools and the apartment search websites that are so common these days. But for this discussion, we will focus primarily on the general engines such as Google and Yahoo, since that's where most of your traffic will come from.
Search engines create databases (or "indexes") through the use of robotic crawlers. These robotic web crawlers are often called "spiders." Both terms -- crawler and spider -- signify the way these robotic components scour the web automatically in search of new web pages and websites to index.
When search engine crawlers find a particular website, they then crawl through the various pages of that site to determine what it's about. If the site has good structure and navigation systems in place, crawlers can follow the hyperlinks from page to page, much the same way as a person would.
In this way, the search engine can identify what the website is about (or what it thinks the website is about) and thus how to categorize it for future searches.
In Plain English: Search engines crawl the web automatically and constantly. When they find websites, they add them to the search engine's database, or index. When you search through Google, you are actually searching Google's database, not the "live" Internet.
How Search Engines Work
Although they determine their results differently, all search engines operate in the same basic fashion. Here's a summary of that process:
- The searcher enters a key phrase into a search engine.
- The search engine searches its database (or "index") to find matches.
- The search engine displays the results in a ranked order based on relevancy.
All search engines perform steps one and two in basically the same fashion. Step three is where they differ. Each search engine uses a different formula (or "algorithm") to determine which results get the highest ranking, the second highest ranking, third highest and so on.
These algorithmic factors represent things you can do to improve your search engine ranking (the goal of an SEO program). In this book, all the actions you take will be two-fold: they will improve your search engine ranking over time, but they will also improve the overall quality and success of your website.
Search Engine Optimization, Defined
In my definition, search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of improving a website for better search engine visibility, usability and conversion rates. You might have noticed that my definition differs from most people's definition of SEO. In my opinion, thinking of SEO in search engine terms alone is a mistake. That's why my definition of search engine optimization includes things like usability and conversion rates.
Sure, SEO can help people find your website. But when you take a more well-rounded and holistic approach to SEO, it can also help those people interact with your site and -- ultimately -- respond in some positive way.
How Do Search Engines Rank Websites?
This book will teach you to improve your business website's search engine ranking for certain key phrases. But how do search engines rank websites to begin with?
Search engine ranking involves a combination of proprietary secrets and public knowledge. For instance, search engine marketing specialists know that each search engine company has its own algorithm. These algorithms are basically a way to automatically evaluate and rank websites based on a set of pre-defined criteria.
What are these pre-defined criteria, you ask? Well now we're getting into the proprietary side of things. Obviously, search engines companies do not want their competitors to know how they develop their algorithms. Nor do they want SEO companies to know these secrets.
With all that being said, there is plenty of public knowledge about how to make a website more visible and better ranked. Let me caution you on something though. Don't ever do anything just for the search engines. That's a bad habit to develop. The strategies I outline in this book will certainly help you climb the search engine "ranks," but more importantly they will help you provide valuable content to your audience. Say it with me now: "People first, search engines second!"
Now with that disclaimer out of the way, here are some of the criteria that can improve a website or blog's search engine rankings.
- Keyword usage - Let's imagine there are two websites about bee keeping. They are equal in all regards except one. Website 'A' uses the phrase "bee keeping" throughout key locations on the site. But website 'B' hardly uses the phrase at all, often replacing it with "keeping" and "this practice" and other generic, non-descriptive phrases. Because of this fundamental difference in keyword usage, website 'A' will outrank website 'B' for bee keeping phrases.
- Age of domain - How old a website is also plays a role in how well it ranks. This is especially true with Google, because the number-one search engine tends to favor older, well-established sites. So now let's assume that our two bee-keeping websites are the same size and have similar, keyword-rich content. But this time, website 'A' is eight years old and website 'B' is only eight months old. Chances are, website 'A' will outrank the younger website.
- Size of website - In scenario #3, let's say our two bee-keeping websites are the exact same age, have similar keyword-rich web content, and are similar in most other regards. But this time, website 'A' has 45 pages of content, and website 'B' only has five pages of content. Website 'A' will likely outrank the smaller website 'B' in the search engines.
- Link popularity - Link popularity refers to the quantity and quality of inbound links (hyperlinks from other websites to your website). There's a lot that goes into link building, as the practice is known. But for this tutorial, suffice it to say that inbound links (from other websites to yours) build link popularity, and link popularity increases search engine ranking. So if our two bee-keeping websites are equal in most regards, but website 'A' has ten times as many links coming in as website 'B' ... website 'A' will once again rank higher than website 'B.'
Of course these are all generalizations, and you rarely have websites that are "alike in all other regards" like the hypothetical websites above. But at least now you'll have some idea of how search engines evaluate and rank websites.
SEO Continued >> Key Phrase Research